If anyone can build your product in a weekend, what's actually defensible? The truth is, the kid in his dorm room now can quickly build the same product that your Series B Startup took 5 years to piece together. "We built it" is about as defensible as "we have a website." Congrats, so does my dentist. So if anything and everything can be built quickly, what's left to build that has real staying power? Are there any moats left? The answer is simple. The last real moat standing is this: An opinionated perspective on the solution And here's what most people miss: Being able to build and understanding the best way to solve a problem aren't remotely the same thing. Building is mechanical now. Decent prompting skills get functional code out the door in days or weeks, not months or years. But having a genuinely informed opinion about the right inputs, workflows, and outputs? That takes years of pattern recognition and listening to customers complain about the same things in twelve different ways (usually while insisting it needs to be fixed yesterday). This is why great products feel "just better" even when you can't articulate why. Every product starts with a Founding team that makes choices. They decide this is the right way, even when it means saying no to features that look obvious. These aren't random decisions. They're accumulated judgment from people who've (hopefully) spent serious time in the problem space. The obvious rebuttal is: But opinions can be copied Sure. Someone can reverse engineer your workflow and clone your positioning. Give them six weeks and some Red Bull and they'll have a landing page that looks eerily familiar. But they can't copy what happens next. Great product people ship constantly. They're plugging holes before users report them. Every customer conversation feeds their model of how things should work. Over time, they get so far ahead that copying them is like hitting a moving target while you're reading their old blog posts. And with the best product teams, what happens over time is magical: Hooks start building. Memory that doesn't port. Context about your preferences. Integration work and muscle memory. Data that makes the product smarter for your specific use case. Good luck migrating all of that to the clone that launched last Tuesday. These switching costs don't show up on any spreadsheet. But they're real. What Builders need to be prepared for is that the market is about to flood with infinite options. Anyone can spin up a solution with three prompts and a credit card. "Build it yourself" is now a legitimate alternative for every customer. We're entering an era where your competition isn't only other Startups, it's also your user deciding they could probably just do this themselves on a Saturday. In that world, only one thing matters: Having a perspective worth paying for. A point of view compelling enough to make people choose your solution over building it themselves. That's the bar now. The products that survive aren't going to be the ones with the best tech or biggest teams. They're going to be the ones where someone formed a genuine opinion about the right way to solve something and kept refining it over and over and over again. Everyone else is just shipping features into an overcrowded market and wondering why they aren't winning. Onwards and upwards, Fintechjunkie